


When the Dog Goes Rabid

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, Guns, Hallucinations, Headcanon, Hurt Eliot Spencer, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 03:08:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9052765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: That one time...in Belgrade...Or one person's take on the moment Eliot Spencer learned to hate the man he'd become.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [page_runner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/page_runner/gifts).



> Being me, I grabbed for "Context for crazy-Eliot" prompt. I didn't go crack-y.
> 
> Just so you know. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy it - thanks for joining us this year!
> 
> (As always when I write Eliot and Damien, much of the headcanon - particularly the names - are courtesy of Scout Lover. If you haven't read her Damien Moreau stuff, go now. I only steal from the absolute best.)

_Too far…too far…too far…_

The accusation beat against his brain, a nauseating counterpoint to the throbbing of his heartbeat and the rasping of his breath. The Jakarta clinic had been his moral event horizon – Eliot knew that now. This? This had crossed a line he would never be able to retreat back over.

“Spencer!”

He flinched, hearing Chapman’s call through the trees. They would be searching for him in earnest now, each unwilling to face Damien’s wrath should they return without his chief enforcer. Eliot paused, bracing himself against the trunk of a nearby tree as he considered his options. _They won’t let you go back alive,_ he realized. They couldn’t. He’d shown too much weakness, too much of his real feelings about the job and Damien’s orders.

 _Damien didn’t order you to rape children,_ his brain argued as he fell slowly to his knees in the snow – seizing desperately for any way he could to rationalize the desire to return to his place at Damien Moreau’s side, to make some sense of the horror he’d left behind him. He hadn’t done the deed himself, but Eliot knew he would never forget the look on the face of the fourteen year old girl he’d found three of his men taking turns with in a back bedroom.

He hadn’t been able to raise even a token protest when Chapman had stepped in behind him and put a bullet in the girl’s brain. A similar fate waited for him now, and on some level Eliot welcomed the idea of having the choice taken from him, of no longer having to live with everything he’d done…everything he’d allowed himself to become.

“Spencer!”

Eliot tried to focus on the sounds of men moving through the trees, tried to calculate how close they might be to his position, but the turn the mission had taken had rattled him too deeply. He was desperately off his game, with anywhere from five minutes to half an hour to decide how badly he still wanted to live…assuming he still wanted to live at all.

Lurching forward, he dry-heaved his misery into the snow.  
*********************  
It was one of his most closely held nightmares brought to life. _Moreau’s Dog_ , they’d called Eliot – at first openly, when his attempts to civilize the rough country killer into something worthy of standing and acting in his name had been common knowledge, and lately only when they could be certain no one who cared was around to hear.

Now he was being forced to listen to Eliot’s second ask for permission to put ‘Moreau’s Dog’ down for good. _You should have given him time after Jakarta. You should have insisted._ He’d known the attack on the clinic had weighed heavily on Eliot, but the very qualities that made him so valuable to Damien were the same that made it hard for him at times to take proper care of himself. The one suggestion Moreau had half-heartedly made about him taking time off had been met with a soft snort of derision and a return to the discussion of security concerns Eliot had about the prep school Damien’s eldest son would be attending in the fall.

 _So here we are,_ he thought, bowing his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. “No fatal action – accidentally or otherwise,” he said, knowing that Chapman was waiting for instructions now. “Secure him if you can, but I want him breathing when I get there.”

He’d sensed his wife come into the room while he was talking; now that things were starting to spin in the direction he wanted, he slipped his phone back into his pocket and turned to face her. “Unless you have something useful to say, Juliana, I would appreciate you keeping your opinions to yourself this time.”

There was too much understanding in her beautiful dark eyes. “You can’t realistically be thinking of bringing him back here. Not around the children, Damien – I won’t allow it!”

Damien felt his hackles rise at having an ultimatum thrown into his face here and now, but managed to force down his first, second and third responses by sheer force of will. Juliana wasn’t precisely his enemy, and whether or not Eliot could be brought home and made whole was the heart of what he was going to Belgrade to find out.

“Whatever has happened,” he said finally, “it is on me to fix it if it can be fixed. To do that, I will have to bring Eliot back here.” Raising a hand, he cut off her expected argument before she could do little more than open her mouth. “I am not unmindful of your concerns. While I am in Belgrade, and until I know what the real truth is, I would ask you to remove yourself and the children to the villa in Mycenae.”

He’d married Juliana as much for her keen mind as her beauty and her social and economic connections, but Damien wasn’t at the point where he could consider the situation with Eliot in any kind of practical or strategic terms. Passing any concerns about his children and their potential vulnerability to Juliana’s control was a literal weight from his already over-burdened shoulders.

It left him free to see whether anything of the man he had fashioned from ‘Moreau’s Dog’ remained.  
*******************************************  
Eliot was starting to hallucinate. Lack of food and dehydration had brought the soft, ever-present mumble of voices in his head to full, screaming life. Bloody ghosts lurked at the edges of his vision, only to vanish when he turned to confront them head on. He’d tried to sleep, but the third time he woke flailing and crying out in terror and confusion he gave it up as a bad job.

In his more lucid moments he was certain his men were still searching the woods for him. It was the main reason he hadn’t dumped his Glocks, although every time he focused too closely on the sleek, deadly weapons, he started to tremble uncontrollably.

 _What you need to control isn’t out there. It’s in here._ Words he hadn’t heard since he was a child, paired with the sense-memory of a hand much like his own resting on his heaving chest. He could continue to sit here while bits of his sanity shredded away like tissue paper, or accept responsibility for the things he had done – orders be damned – and do something to make sure he never ended up down this hole again.

Eliot brushed calloused fingers across the soft underside of his chin, and imagined the feel of a gun barrel wedged in place. It was the cleanest option he had in front of him. One shot, placed right – he’d be dead before he hit the floor.

And the choice would be his, not one of the men currently looking to put him down like a rabid dog.

He wasn’t consciously aware of drawing the Glock under his left arm, until a voice he’d convinced himself he would never hear again said softly, “You don’t want to do that.”

Eliot hadn’t realized until just that moment how deep his instinct for self-preservation ran. His entire body was suddenly on full alert, and the gun he’d been intending to use to end his life was aimed right between the eyes of Damien Moreau.

Moreau’s expression was soft, concerned; his hands raised in surrender. “Put the weapon down, moj brat. I am not here to hurt you.”

A short bark of laughter escaped Eliot as he half-collapsed against the wall at his back. Moreau took an instinctive step forward, sensing an opening, but Eliot’s aim immediately refocused – bringing him up short again. “You won’t, but you’ll give the order,” he said. “You don’t have a choice.” He knew the rules that governed here better than Damien did – he’d written them, after all.

“Eliot, nothing has happened here that cannot be fixed.” Concern was evident and genuine in every line of Moreau’s being. It was the perfect balm to Eliot’s battered and bruised psyche, and the tattered remnants of his soul, and he’d never wanted to believe anything more in his life. “Come home with me now – I give you my word, no one will hurt you until this is sorted.”

Movement at the edge of his vision distracted Eliot for a crucial split second. He took his eye off Moreau long enough to register Chapman rushing him. Dropping the Glock, Eliot automatically knocked Chapman’s arms away, then rocked his second in command with an elbow to the side of his face.

It was the last thing he knew before the taser Damien fired at him enveloped him in a blanket of light and electricity – every muscle in his body locking automatically into tight, painful rigidity.

Darkness, when it finally took him, was a blessing.  
****************************************  
Blood dripping from his nose and cheek, Chapman stooped long enough to sweep Eliot’s fallen weapon into his hand, before drawing a bead on the fallen man’s head. “Put it away,” Damien snapped, letting every bit of the disgust he felt for Chapman in that moment infuse his words.

Their eyes met, and Moreau saw the flash of defiance in Chapman’s eyes. Fury breaking over him, he closed the distance separating them in two quick strides and snatched the Glock from the other man’s grip. “You will get this man medical attention and see that he is ready for travel. Take whatever precautions you must to secure him, but if he is unduly harmed Chapman, you will answer for it personally.”

He stared the man down long enough for Chapman to understand how serious he was, relaxing only when the man drew himself up to full attention and nodded. “Eliot Spencer is not some dog,” Damien said, glancing down at the man he valued more than any brother he could have ever imagined having. “He will not be treated like one, no matter where this road takes us, or how his story ends.”


End file.
